In a new book out on 10 June, God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens follows in the footsteps of his fellow celebrity atheists, Richard Dawkins and A.C Grayling (among many), in arguing that the world would be a better place without religion. The former tormenter of Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton has now turned his guns on God. He was interviewed in The Times on 30 May and an excerpt from the book was reproduced in the Art and Entertainment supplement the following day.

Like Dawkins and Grayling, Hitchens goes to great lengths to distance himself from the idea that he is a form of believer on the grounds that his views are completely different from those of religious people. Conscious, no doubt, of the charge that his god is 'reason', he asserts: 'We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.' This raises questions about the other sources of authority that Hitchens uses to determine what is 'scientific' and 'reasonable'.

Anyone looking for new or measured arguments against the existence of God will not find them here. Religion is 'violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children,' says Hitchens. Well, that clears that up then.

Ultimately, Christopher Hitchens' atheistic world-view is a type of faith, and the version of it he promotes is, it seems, distinctly fundamentalist.